This invention relates to a toy car for children with a pedal drive and a seat in the car body section. Vehicles of this type are normally used for children from two to six years of age according to international practice.
It is known in the art to operate toy vehicles of this type as open tricycles and also to manufacture children's or toy vehicles with a more or less open car body on a four-wheel undercarriage. The particular drawback affecting these two vehicle types resides in the fact that even though the tricycle, namely a vehicle that comprises one front wheel and two rear wheels, offers a great deal of maneuverability, it fails to give the visual impression of an automobile. The rear wheels are normally idling on the rear axle.
Other versions are also known in the art wherein the propelling force is transmitted to the rear wheels.
Vehicles with four wheels and a steering mechanism of appropriately more complicated design, however, do not offer and provide the surprising maneuverability of the three-wheel drive concept.
Vehicles with four wheels must have a corresponding wheel base between the front and rear wheels so that the overall length of the vehicle is relatively long. This great overall length may have been the reason why such four-wheel vehicles are being bought to a restricted extent only because their use is self-prohibitory in normal living quarters and their outdoor use also would require wide spaces to be available.
The many years' efforts by those skilled in the art to develop a car-like (automobile-like) toy vehicle for infants have failed to date. The reasons for this failure have been mainly that selection of a conventional drive comprising pedal and chain and compliance with ruling safety provisions to provide specified safety distances and spacings have led to vehicle dimensions of especially great lengths, which render their use by infants well nigh impossible.
To resolve these problems, a compromise is being adopted which consists in using a pushrod drive and a mostly light-gauge cover hood in a car body configuration; but this is susceptible to fracture. While vehicles of this type seem to be suitable for infant use, they are basically inferior to conventional tricycles or four-wheel vehicles due to their restricted maneuverability and their uncomfortable drive.
Another problem that a four-wheel car body poses is its stability, especially where plastics blow-moulding methods must be used for the production thereof. To make it technically economical, the blow-moulding process must be adapted to produce substantially equal wall thicknesses. Such demands are not compatible with the normally rough handling by children and concomitant exposure to strain due to collision of two vehicles or collision with obstacles. These have been factors that kept the trade from simply combining the three-wheel drive (while providing the foot space required therefor) with a four-wheel car body because space problems would multiply in such a combination due to the applicable high torsional forces.